Preferably, paging groups are large enough for a mobile station (MS) to stay most of its time within the same paging group and small enough to render paging overhead reasonable.
A paging group may include one or more base stations, and one base station may be contained in one or more paging groups. The paging groups may be defined in a management system. A paging group may use a paging group-action backbone network message. In addition, a paging controller uses another backbone message (paging-announce message), to manage the list of mobile stations in an idle mode and initiate paging of a mobile station on all base stations belonging to a paging group.